


your golden child grew up

by eggosandxmen



Category: Mabel (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Gen, Lots of Rest for Mabel, No Rest For Thomas, abuse (mentioned), doing his goddamn best thomas lastname, punk Mabel Martin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:21:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27169228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eggosandxmen/pseuds/eggosandxmen
Summary: Mabel’s sipping hot cocoa, shivering like a bird, and Thomas is busying himself with washing plates in the sink so he can avoid taking her in fully. He thinks it might burn him, like the sun or flames or something as equally terrifying as his daughter.
Relationships: Anna Limon/Mabel Martin, Thomas & Lily Martin (mentioned), Thomas & Mabel Martin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> canon: Thomas is stuck in a loop and always will be he has never seen Mabel and never will see Mabel—  
> me, kicking in with a hyperfixation on this man, very little sleep, and a very specific family trope obsession: okay but WHAT IF.
> 
> Anyway, yeah, Thomas isn’t stuck in a loop and a very strange young girl in a boarding school uniform just showed up on his doorstep!

Mabel’s sipping hot cocoa, shivering like a bird, and Thomas is busying himself with washing plates in the sink so he can avoid taking her in fully. He thinks it might burn him, like the sun or flames or something as equally terrifying as his daughter. 

She’s got his jaw and hair color and the scattering of acne he dealt with as a teenager; eyes greener than Lily’s were and cuts along her hands and arms. The old school blazer over her shoulders is ripped to shreds, and she’s his _daughter_ , this is Mabel, this is Mabel. 

Thomas scrubs harder at the plate. She hasn’t spoken, she hasn’t even looked at him yet, but he puts his plate down and takes a deep breath and turns around.

“Do you have anyone you’d like me to call? Someone you live with?”

Her shoulders hunch up near her ears and she shakes her head three times, hard.

“Okay,” Thomas says quickly, “alright, that’s okay. Here, do you want to eat something? I can make you a sandwich.”

Mabel nods, grabs the peach he gives her to stave off hunger until he can find the cold cuts, and gets the juice all over her mouth while she eats.

“What do you like on your sandwiches?” Thomas asks, hit with a small pang of sadness at something as little as that. He knows nothing about her except her name. Damn the Martin family. Damn them all.

Mabel shrugs again, mutters anything with a slight slur that makes it sound like her mouth is in pain, but Thomas doesn’t pry. He sticks on pretty much everything in the fridge and hands it over, and she eats the whole thing in about fifteen seconds.

Okay. Okay.

“Do you want me to get you some clean clothes? You can go shower if you need.” 

Mabel nods again and gets up shakily, pulling herself along the counter. One of her legs must have gotten hurt. 

“It’s up the stairs to the left. Do you need help?” She shakes her head before nearly collapsing, so he reaches his arms out and she clamps onto it, the two of them shuffling for a few steps before Thomas decides oh, to hell with it.

“Can I pick you up?” he asks, and Mabel squeezes his arm a little; taking that as a yes, he swings her up in his arms.

She’s much too light for Thomas’ comfort—he’s able to haul her up the stairs with ease, dropping her in front of the door. “I’m gonna go find some clothes. You can take a shower, wash up, whatever you need.”

And then he turns around and walks to his room before he does something stupid like have a panic attack or cry.

He ends up finding his old college sweatshirt and a pair of pajama pants, which he shoves on the bathroom counter with his eyes closed, before heading back downstairs.

He’s got a guest room, usually taken up by Jack or one of his cousins, but no one’s over currently; he cleans the piles of clothes off the bed, remakes it, and carries Mabel’s bag in. 

When he turns around to hit the lights, Mabel’s standing in the doorway, completely silent. He jumps.

She’s wearing his sweater, the pants hiked up so they don’t trail past her feet, and her hair’s in a very messy braid, tied with a piece of red string she must have been carrying around.

“Oh, hey,” he says. “You can stay in here for tonight, okay?”

She nods, and he takes that as a point to leave, passing her her backpack and closing the door softly behind him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> me at all times: [thinks about thomas and mabel]

Mabel wakes up to birdsong. After her eyes adjust to the darkness of the room, she sits up. Her fa— her— Thomas must have closed the shades.

She opens one of the shades up and is pleasantly surprised to find both a very nice view of the woods and absolutely no locks on the window. She pries it open and waves at the sparrow perched on a tree near her, hanging halfway out the house.

If she really tries, she can still feel the pull of The House, way off at the other end of town. It misses her terribly; she’s still mad at it, though, for letting Sally send her away to school.

She debates just staying in the room, but eventually her stomach wins over her brain and she manages to yank herself down the stairs (one of her legs still might have a bullet in it— she’ll have to check later) and into the kitchen, where she finds absolutely no Thomas nor any other adult, for which she feels incredibly grateful. There’s a muffin on the counter, along with a note.

_Mabel—  
Went to town for groceries. You can do what you like, but please don’t wander too far until I figure out what to do next. I’ll be back around noon._

He didn’t sign it, but the chicken-scratch is the same as the address paper Mabel has carried in her pocket since she was five. 

The clocks say it’s already ten o’clock, so Mabel eats her muffin while wandering the house. There isn’t much in it— Thomas’ bedroom is a little messy, his office has nothing but his degree and a half-empty bookshelf— but the living room’s large collection of CDs keeps her busy for a little while. She takes London Calling up to her room, thinking that with the amount of dust on it he probably won’t mind, and then decides to raid his desk.

There’s a picture of her from when she was maybe three in it, kept with a photo of Thomas and a few other boys when they couldn’t be older than sixteen. A note on the back of it declares it to be from a friend (Mabel, recognizing Luna’s handwriting, makes a mental note to ask the girl in the mirror about it later). She’s putting it away when she hears the garage door open and all but runs back to her room, pulling the shade back down and getting back under the blankets hurriedly.

Thomas doesn’t come in, even as she hears him bustling around the kitchen and then moving around the whole house. It’s very strange to have her privacy respected after spending the past chunk of her life in a dormitory with a gaggle of teenage girls and some less-than-caring teachers (and Aurora Silver’s experiments, too, but Mabel refuses to think about those). 

When Thomas does come in, he only does so to put a plate of food on the shelf near the door, closing the door softly behind him. If he could tell she was faking sleep, he didn’t say so.

Eventually she’s going to have to confront him, and possibly get that bullet out, so she pulls herself out of bed and down the stairs, half-marching over to where Thomas is at the kitchen table, finishing paperwork.

“I think there’s a bullet in my leg,” she says. “Also, the muffin was good.”

Thomas looks up, blinks, and pushes his papers to the side immediately. “Can I see? Please?”

Mabel pulls up her pant leg and— well, yes, that does seem to be a bullet hole.

“How long has this been there for?” Thomas asks, getting a pair of tweezers from the drawer and his reading glasses from the counter like he is very clearly trying not to panic.

“A week, I think?” Mabel bites down on their wrist when he starts poking at the wound, eventually pulling something small out.

“Yup,” Thomas says, “that’s a bullet.”

He throws it in the trash before Mabel can even ask to keep it and then gets her to sit down on the couch.

“Do you have any other life-threatening injuries I should know about?” he asks, and she shrugs. “Okay. Can we talk?”

Mabel blinks and then nods. 

“Cool.” Thomas taps his fingers on his leg. “I need to know where you ran away from.”

“Boarding school.” Mabel pauses. “It’s called El Segundo Academy. They weren’t…” 

She trails off.

“Okay,” says Thomas. “Who did you live with before you were there?”

“My grandmother,” Mabel responds, pulling at a loose thread on her sweatshirt. “My mother died when I was four.”

“I know,” Thomas says. “I remember that. I’m sorry.”

“She wasn’t a very good mother,” Mabel says, shrugging. “My grandmother wasn’t particularly great at raising children either, so what can I say?”

Thomas makes a face like he’s trying incredibly hard not to give her exactly his opinions on the other half of her family. Instead: “I’m going to try to get custody of you, if you want me to,” Thomas says. “You don’t have to say yes.”

“Yes,” Mabel says, at exactly the same time.

Thomas smiles, the first real proper smile he’s done for her, and Mabel grins back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway I love them chapters should be updating twice a week unless there’s a big demand in which case I have like four chapters saved up


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> school time for mabel, and a certain curly-haired saint’s first appearance.

“Hi, etin,” the woman outside the door says, and Mabel makes a strangled noise before running down the hall, past Thomas, and through to the bedrooms.

Thomas looks at the woman and gives half a smile. “Hey, June.”

“Don’t you nickname me, Thomas the wanderer,” she mutters, pulling her into a hug.

“Sorry, Juniper,” he says dutifully into her shoulder.

She pulls away to grin at him. She hasn’t changed much since the last time he saw her— long dark hair, tan skin that’s slightly paler than usual due to Irish weather, and flowers in her hair. Her smile drops slightly.

“Why did she run?”

“I have no idea.” Thomas lets Juniper in, grabbing wine from the fridge. “I think the Scorned by Lily Martin Club hasn’t had a meeting in far too long.” 

The two of them had become friends when he had heard about Lily’s death; he went to the funeral, mostly for his own peace of mind and to try to get into contact with the other Martins, assuming he’d get custody of his daughter. He had ended up standing in the back with a strange young woman with flowers in her hair, and she’d smiled at him and whispered that she was gay and he didn’t need to worry about being cursed by a woman again on her part. He had blinked and asked what the hell she meant, and she’d stuck out her hand and said her name was Juniper and she was also Lily’s ex. They have a club. It’s fantastic.

Juniper takes the wine and chugs it, passing it to Thomas and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. He puts it on the counter after drinking some himself, and goes to go get Mabel. 

He knocks on her door softly and waits for her to open it, waving a little. “Hi. Why did you run away earlier?”

She stays firmly quiet.

“That’s my friend, Juniper. She’s pretty cool, but if she scares you, I’ll make her leave.”

“She doesn’t scare me,” Mabel mutters, crossing her arms. “She— she used to send my mother letters. She knew my mother, so she knows me, so I ran before she could steal even more of me unwillingly.”

Thomas marks that down on the list in his head he’s taken to calling “Mabel almost definitely isn’t human, but that’s okay” and then sighs. “She isn’t going to steal any parts of you, I promise.”

“Really?” Mabel blinks at him. “You swear?”

“I swear to you, Mabel Martin, that you will always be safe in this house and with me, that Juniper Creed is a good woman, and that she has your best interests at heart.” 

Mabel smiles at him a little. “You did a good job with that. Can’t make any loopholes.”

“Thank you, I’ve been practicing.” Thomas moves aside so Mabel can leave the room and go tumbling down the stairs. 

Thomas can hear the two of them talking rather loudly downstairs and smiles.

“I’m Mabel Martin!” Mabel says. “And you’re Juniper. Your name was on my mother’s closet.”

“Yes, it was. Do you know how it got there?”

“No,” Mabel says, with the sort of look she always gets when someone is going to tell a story. “With a knife?”

“Yes. I snuck through the window by climbing the rose vines and brought my pocket knife, and we wrote our names on the door and then I had to literally jump out the window because Lily’s mother was coming.”

“I’ve done that!” Mabel says. “The rose bushes always caught me.”

“Yes, they’re very good sports about it.” Juniper looks up to Thomas when he comes back in. “Welcome back.”

“Had to check on the more important side of this house’s inhabitants,” he grins, and Juniper punches his arm. “Also, Mabel, we’re largely going to just catch up tonight, so if you want to go out with friends or anything, feel free.”

Mabel blushes beet red and mutters something about maybe going to see a classmate and Thomas raises an eyebrow. “I have never seen you embarrassed, who is this classmate and why are they making you blush?”

“Their names are Janet and Anna,” Mabel says, “and that is all I am telling you for now until I either become their friend or don’t.”

“Which one is making you blush? Or is it both of them?”

“I am not answering that.”

“Noted. Just text me when you get there and when you’re coming home, alright?”

“Yes,” Mabel says, turning around to take her jacket off the coat hanger. “Goodbye, Juniper, goodbye, Dad.”

She walks out the door, still pulling on her jacket, and it takes a second for Thomas to register. “Oh,” he says. “She’s never actually called me dad before.”

Juniper smiles at him, softer than usual. “You alright?”

“Yeah. Just. Okay. I need some terrible wine and an action movie before I process that.”

“I brought Pacific Rim.”

“This is why I love you.” 

Mabel’s first day at school hadn’t gone particularly well, but it wasn’t particularly horrible, either. She ate her lunch outside the school building with a very nice stray cat, talking to herself until someone approached her, curly-haired with big black boots and a worn red hoodie. Mabel looked up to the other person’s face to find a girl her age with a nervous smile. 

“Hi,” the girl said, “I’m Anna. Do you want to eat with me and my friend?” 

She fell in love immediately.

“Can I have a minute to say goodbye to him?” Mabel asked, gesturing at the stray cat.

“Yeah, sure.” Anna paused when Mabel got up after doing so. “All the animals keep following you. You’re like a Disney princess.”

“I should hope I’m a little scarier than that.”

Anna laughed and then took her hand, pulling her to the table farthest from the rest of the student body. Mabel continued to fall in love.

There was another girl there, playing a very serious trading-card game with herself, which wasn’t a thing Mabel thought possible.

“Janet, move over.”

“One minute, Ann’—“ 

“New girl, remember? We made a plan? You promised you’d be nice?”

Janet looked up from her cards, blinked, and then smiled. “Oh, yeah! Hey, you’re Mabel, right? I’m Janet Kirk.”

“Hello, Janet Kirk,” Mabel said, sitting down. 

“Just Janet is fine. Or her majesty the ghost queen—“ At this, Anna shoved Janet’s shoulder, but Janet bounced right back. “Dude, dude, do you like paranormal stuff?”

Mabel had nodded and Janet flapped her hands, grinning even wider. 

“So last week me and Anna were in the woods, right— and we heard some seriously creepy shit, and we’re gonna go look tomorrow night, okay? You wanna come?”

“Like— with you both?” Thomas had drilled her on this— it was okay to accept invitations as long as she could walk to wherever it was and as long as she felt comfortable. “Yes, I would like to come. To hunt ghosts. With you.”

“Fuck yeah!” Janet said. 

“Meet us down by the corner store at seven tomorrow, okay?” said Anna.

And now here Mabel is, walking down to the store. She doesn’t let herself dwell on calling Thomas dad— it had slipped out, and anyway, she had meant it. He’s her father, and they’d never really established any boundaries on the names thing (she’d called Lily maman up until she’d died, but she knew Thomas wasn’t French, so she couldn’t take that by translation, and Dad seemed to work well enough). Either way, he’s earned the title of endearment more than Lily ever had, and she’d only stayed with him for a month.

She was Not Dwelling On It.

But there was Anna, and all other thoughts slipped her mind.

“Janet bailed on us,” Anna tells her when she gets over to her. “Her sister went to a party and she has to cover for her.”

“Oh,” says Mabel.

“It’s okay though! I’m sure we’ll be fine.” Anna pauses. “Honestly, I don’t really want to go to the woods. It— it’s got, I don’t know, an aura. Some bad vibes, or something.”

“Then we shouldn’t go,” says Mabel. “Whatever you want to do.”

Anna smiles sheepishly and takes Mabel’s hand almost subconsciously, tugging her down the street. “I’ll show you the best place in town.”

“This is a graveyard,” Mabel says.

“Yup,” Anna replies, from where she’s currently climbing over the gates. “No one watches it, anyway, and the only creepy stuff I’ve ever been able to find are some cool bones.”

Mabel pulls herself through two of the bars and grins at her. “What did you do with the bones?”

“Oh, I collect them! They’re at home.”

“Nice.” Mabel pauses. “Do you maybe want to— um. Well. Do that— again.”

“What?”

“Hold hands?” Oh, she’s blushing again.

Anna laughs and takes her hand, and the two of them go to a little bench under a tree, Anna swinging her legs and looking around.

“You wanna play twenty questions?” she asks. “I don’t know much about you, and— sorry, just thought—“

“I would also like to know about you, if you’re worried about that.”

Anna nods, looking grateful. “Sorry. I get nervous. So I’ll ask you one and then you answer and I’ll answer it too, and then you go, same deal?”

“Okay.”

“So, let me think. What’s your favorite class in school?”

“Math,” Mabel answers immediately. “It all makes sense.”

Anna laughs. “I’m currently failing math. I tend to fall asleep in most classes. But mine is probably English.”

Mabel thinks for a second. “Good answer. What’s your favorite story?”

“The twelve dancing princesses. You?”

“Bluebeard.”

“Oh, of course. I have my strange girls with worn shoes and you have a murderous pirate.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mabel asks, smiling.

“Nothing. It just fits.” Anna hums for a second. “Oh— where did you live before you moved here?”

“I lived here when I was a kid, actually, with my grandmother up in that house on the hill,” Mabel says, suddenly having to physically stop herself from telling Anna everything. “But, uh, I got sent to boarding school when I was twelve, and I left, and then I started staying with my dad.”

“Oh, you’re one of those Martins,” Anna says, understanding dawning on her face. “Don’t know why I didn’t put that one together.”

Mabel pulls her hand away, suddenly, and Anna looks up, confused. “Everything okay?”

“I’m— don’t say that. They’re all cowards. I’m not.”

“Not like that— oh, shit, Mabel, no. I just meant that you were related to them. Listen, I’ve met your grandmother, she is— not very nice. I think you’re awesome, and way more like your dad.” Anna grabs onto a piece of her own hair and yanks it. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Mabel takes her hand again, clumsily. “Don’t pull on your hair, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“It’s a nervous tic.” Anna stares at their hands for a few seconds. “It’s— uh, it’s your turn.”

“How come you like ghosts so much?”

“My uncle disappeared before I was born and they never found him. What about you?”

“There’s a lot of them in my head.”

“What do you dream about, when you can remember your dreams?”

“The end of the world. A snake eating its own tail. My mother and her mother and her mother all wrapped up inside me. My father getting lost.” Mabel pauses. “You?”

“Monsters and a girl eating me from inside out.” 

“Seems we’re both strange dreamers.”

“Good to have that in common.”

Mabel squeezes Anna’s hand, and the graveyard around them stays alive with birdsong and moonlight, and maybe for once it’s all kind of okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love you blessed saint anna limón and you juniper who does not die

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY A FEW NOTES:  
> this is gonna be multi-chaptered and weird and complicated and you bet your ass anna limón’s gonna show up soon
> 
> i AM NOT. ERASING. ANY PARTS OF CANON. THAT ARE NOT THOMAS’ LOOP. mabel still dealt with everything and is still fae! i would never just up and erase mabel’s arc and storyline, she means the world to me; the only thing I’m changing is she ends up with her dad instead of the hill. this is more canon divergence than straight up AU! though vera and luna might also be teenagers just because i adore them
> 
> anna and mabes are the same age because canon is confusing and i’m tired! it’s somewhere around 2007 right now :-)
> 
> anyway i thought thom should be able to get his shot being mabel’s dad. in this house we hate lily and mourn thomas


End file.
